User:Drvestone

Note: Because of a back injury, I have been on Wiki only infrequently since January.

Current projects: Revising Traditional Knowledge entry, to make it more encyclopedia-like.

Revising Stolen Generations entry, to add more historical facts - major historical events and public policies are still missing from the entry.

Revising Prehistory of Australia entry, to add more facts and citations on water management and fish farming.

Revising Head Injury and Traumatic Brain Injury entries to more accurately reflect current literature in those fields.

Biography: I worked in academia for many years, primarily in neuroscience and psychology. I still have an affiliate appointment at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, although I am currently working in Colorado, USA, educating professionals about traumatic brain injury, autism, and dementia. I am active in the Society for Neuroscience, and contribute to their Wikipedia project by editing articles here.

Indigenous issues: One of my primary interests is in building bridges between indigenous knowledge systems and scientific knowledge systems, so that both sides can understand how the other manages knowledge. I am a member of the AAAS Science & Human Rights Program. My work in this area involves extensive research and reading on pre-colonial and colonial history, indigenous mental health, and indigenous knowledge management.

Scientific expertise: My research as a scientist primarily focuses on brain-based disorders that create problems with social behaviour and cognition: frontal lobe damage from head injury, frontotemporal dementia, and also autism & Asperger's syndrome. I also do research in evolutionary psychology, first focusing on social behaviour, and now on place attachment. I am on the editorial board of the journal Social Neuroscience.

My past: My A.B. is from Harvard, in physics, my Ph.D. is from Stanford, in experimental psychology. I did postdoctoral research at the Evolution & Human Behaviour Program at the University of Michigan and the Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis. I also did a brief stint in public health research at the Prevention Sciences Group, UC San Francisco. I was a visiting scholar in Simon Baron-Cohen's lab at the University of Cambridge, then was an assistant professor at the University of Denver, and a tenured senior lecturer (like an American associate professor) at the University of Queensland. I was co-winner of the University of Queensland's Equity Office Diversity Award for my part in organizing, with my Aboriginal colleagues and my psychologist colleagues, a workshop on indigenous mental health. My professional history and my publications can be found on my web site, http://www.assesscompetency.com/articles.html. I am currently offering continuing education courses to lawyers, judges, and psychologists about disability and decision-making competency in people with brain disorders, and I continue to work on indigenous issues.

Contacting me: I can be reached at vestone@gmail.com, through my web site, http://www.assesscompetency.com, or through the talk page here on my user page.